Viestintä monikielisessä työyhteisössä – tapaustutkimus ulkomaalaisesta työharjoittelijasta suomalaisessa yrityksessä

This article discusses communication in a multilingual workplace. The paper draws on the results of a qualitative case study of a Finnish medium-sized company, in which a student with Asian background was doing his practical training period of three months. The student, the company’s management and the training supervisor of the University of Applied Sciences were interviewed in different phases of this training period. The objective was to study what kind of communicative situations occurred in the work community, which languages were chosen in these situations, and how the knowledge-sharing process functions from the trainee’s point of view. The analysis of the data is based on the concept of organizational communication (Juholin 2007) and dialogical perspective of multilingualism (Dufva & Pietikäinen 2009). The results show that the student’s Finnish language skills were not good enough for him to receive topical information, share or discuss the major issues of the organization or to successfully act as a part of the work community. In addition, multilingualism reduced especially face-to-face communication and thus disrupted the communication. Multilingualism could not be used as a resource in the work community.